THE EDUCATION OF MRS. BEMIS

In an updated and more geriatric version of Now, Voyager, Sedgwick (The Dark House, 2000) portrays a young psychiatrist unlocking the closets and airing out the skeletons in the ancestral home of an unhappy Boston Brahmin.

Madeleine Bemis is one of those dignified old New England women who can’t lose her good taste even in the midst of a nervous breakdown: One day she is found in Filene’s, curled in a fetal position in the bedding department’s best four-poster. Also in the store is a psychiatrist, Alice Matthews, who intervenes and helps check Madeleine into a mental hospital. Madeleine becomes Alice’s patient, and, in the course of her treatment, she and Alice become good friends. Profoundly depressed and not given to self-revelation in the best of times, Madeleine tells her story with the greatest reluctance and only after much prodding from Alice. The daughter of a prominent though not especially wealthy Boston family, Madeleine made a good marriage to a handsome and extremely eligible young man with whom she lived contentedly for many years, until his death in 1979. But there were parts of her past that remained hidden from everyone in her world—even from her husband. The most prominent of these was the affair she had with Gerald, a gardener who worked briefly for her parents during WWII. Slightly crippled with a deformed foot, Gerald was a dark, brooding sort unlike any of the men Madeleine had met at her family’s dances and parties. As Alice slowly pieces together the fragments of Madeleine’s recollections, she becomes aware of another person who seems to be haunting Madeleine as well: a younger man named Brendan, who was recently found by swimmers, floating dead in the ocean. But who was he? And what was he to Madeleine?

Obvious and overlong, but nevertheless a well-mannered tale, narrated at a nice steady pace in the best old-fashioned way.